OSCON Highlights

Damian
Conway’s
API design tutorial used Perl for the examples, but the ideas can
reasonably be applied to most other languages as well. The talk was
organized around Arthur C. Clark’s third law of
prediction:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The idea is to develop software modules that are so clever they can be
useful with a minimal interface or even no interface at all. A good
example of this is Perl’s code>strict</code>
pragma which does everything expected just by adding use
strict.

Bruce
Lawson
discussed the future with HTML 5. All of the major browser players –
Microsoft (IE), Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Opera (Opera) and
Google (Chrome) – support some subset of the features of HTML 5
already, so you can start playing with it today. HTML 5 is (mostly) a
superset of HTML 4 which means HTML 5 pages will usually degrade with
some semblance of grace. Because it is so common for page structures to
include distinct areas for headers (not to be confused with
HEAD), footers and navigation menus, HTML 5 has
header, footer and nav tags.
Unlike a div with a specific id attribute, these tags have
semantic meaning that can be used by page readers. Forms in HTML 5 have
a whole slough of features that previously could only by achieved with a
lot of Javascript. Among these features are common validations (required
fields, valid email formats, valid numbers, etc.), an
autofocus attribute and a calendar picker.